Halcyon

Cold rain spattered the rocks along the pier.  Beneath a mane of graying dark hair, two steel eyes reflected the overcast sky, the harsh light of an ancient world, a world of nature, of evolution by erosion... watching waves gently crest, devoid of boats or people, listening to the whistling wind, chilling to the bone.  In the distance stood a rusted lighthouse.  The floods which drowned the coast, and scoured Noram's Atlantic seaboard, should have demolished the old structure; yet it somehow survived centuries and impossible odds.

Frequencies shifted, and realigned.

They were trying to pull him back... out there, in the future, from the cold, lightless Finality which awaited, and constituted the universe's eventual, inevitable end.

In the end waited the Soul Bank.  Souls were energy... frequencies along specific wavelengths.  The dead died in body, but their souls, their spirits, lived on.  Up there, at The End, they came together in the bank, every sentient intelligence which had ever populated a world, a galaxy, human or otherwise, throughout time.  He had been there too.  Would be.  But he was different.  Unique.  He had transcended, and returned... here now, in that past, a few short years after leaving the only life he had known, a life of travel and adventure, achievements and failures, of command and service... leaving it behind forever.  He could not go back to that life, nor would he.  Yet they were trying to pull him back.  They kept trying, again and again, compounding the problem, continually failing to learn their lesson.

Stephen April.  That had been his name... a name which meant nothing anymore; a cold memory of a life belonging to another man born under it.  Names themselves meant nothing to him now.  Who was he, then?  He simply... was. – his essence, all which mattered, in the human form, draped in long black overcoat, closed in a personal forcefield, perched on the jagged rocks of Boston's former coastline, amidst crashing Atlantic waves.  The people he'd once known knew him as Stephen April.  But no one ever truly knew him.  He had died.  He saw the end of the universe... the final, ultimate end.  He had seen it all.  He had been through the Soul Bank.  And he had returned.  He had been reborn.

Earth, still populated, was to him lifeless... Human existence, an existence he once treasured: Nothing... A shadow, a pale reflection of a truer life, a higher existence, all around, which could not be seen with fleshly eyes.  There existed a threshold most could not find, or did not know how to cross, and those few who did, were too frightened to dare.  True life, real life, waited on the other side.  Science could not find it.  That was a lesson humanity had still to learn.  Stephen April learned it, the hard way: He had died.  But death was not the answer... not the door many claimed.  There is another side to life, but you cannot reach it by dying.

Since returning, he had seen the effects, the folly, of the pervasive, ever-increasing dependence on science and technology inundating the once-united collection of planets called 'Federation'.  The civil war killed billions, wiped out planets, and turned the survivors' lives upside down, transforming the Federation into something else, a pale echo of its own past glory.  Earth: Populated, yet only a fraction of previous figures.  The halcyon days, of belief in that glory, were gone.  Nothing physical ever lasted.  Nothing was ever meant to.  Whether it ended in a blaze, or faded like a whisper... all, everything, came to an end.  He knew that.  He had seen it.  He had ended, himself.  And whereas he once saw the pattern of his life as a saga, a series of incidents, chapters, leading from beginning to middle to end, like plot-points in a story... He had moved beyond that, to here: A steady state existence without beginning or end, or any shape that human minds could understand.  Again, he simply... was.

On the calendar by which Stephen April once reckoned his life, it was the year 2409 – 346, Common Era.  Somewhere among distant stars, another starship Arcadia sailed, with a new crew.  It had been six months since the end of the civil war, blamed on Humanists, which upset and nearly tore apart the political entity labeled the United Federation of Planets.  The chaos proved costly.  Life was more uncertain than ever, in this period of time to which he had consigned himself.  Many feared the future, and struggled to endure... unable to reclaim the past, a past which no longer existed, yet unable to make a new future, a future of confidence, a life of security without need to worry.  The Federation was trapped in a recession... and for this reason, relied more heavily on starships again, as it once did, before the universal transporter, before subspace wormholes and all of those late 24th century innovations, inventions April had helped to bring about.  The way forward was sometimes the way back.

Starships, for all their sophistication, were tiny, fragile things compared to the massive universal power... and there were those who didn't want to go back, who felt that the Federation's day was over, that it had had its time, and did not want it resurrected or made to survive.  April did not blame them.  He understood.  The Federation was built on a fundamental flaw, dooming it to collapse before it ever began.  Yet the political ideology of the Humanists precluded another simple truth, more fundamental than anything else on this entire plane of existence: Judgment, final judgment, belonged in the hands of a higher power, whom they too often forgot, or ignored.  God ruled Stephen April's life now... as it was, in the final years of his previous life, before the incident which diverted him from his destiny.  The clone had April's consciousness, yet not April's soul.  That clone had never truly been Stephen April.  Stephen April was no longer truly the Stephen April once known to others... except, perhaps, in name only.  And those who created the clone... They were still out there.  The saga of his life was, apparently, unfinished.

The clone died, committed suicide, and now, Stephen April, the one true April, was back.  He was here, and not without purpose.  He had to forge ahead, discover the shape of that purpose, the revelation of his return.  Only God knew why he was here.